I teach undergraduate survey courses in European history and world history; an intermediate-level undergraduate course on Europe during the Age of the Thirty Years War, 1500-1650; upper-level undergraduate courses on the “European Renaissance”; “Reformation and Society”; “Marriage, Family and Sexuality”; and “The European Witch-Hunt”; and graduate courses in “Society and Religion”, “Popular Culture and Everyday Life”, and “Crime, Society, and the Law” during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period. I have also taught the department’s required graduate courses in “Historiography” and “College Teaching and Professional Activity”; and co-taught the Ethnohistory Seminar (with José António Brandão) and a seminar on “Princes and their Cities in Burgundian and Habsburg Europe” (with James Murray), offered at the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies in Chicago.

Research

I am interested in the history of central Europe from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, especially the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, which has been an important region of encounter between different languages, cultures, and societies. An interest in cities led me to my continuing research focus on the Prague cities, bilingual and multi-confessional communities, which, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, faced the dual challenges of political centralization and religious reform, and became an important Habsburg residential city and cultural center.

Selected
Publications

Between Lipany and White Mountain, Essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bohemian History in Modern Czech Scholarship, edited, with an introduction and bibliography by James R. Palmitessa (Brill: Leiden, 2014) (News page)

Material
Culture and Daily Life in the New City of Prague in the Age
of Rudolf II (Krems: Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 1997)